DISTRICT NURSE’S DASH TO SAVE YOUNG MOTHER

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 38, 14 September 1949, Page 5

DISTRICT NURSE’S DASH TO SAVE YOUNG MOTHER

Recently, the Sunday afternoon visitors to the district hospital at Whakatane were mildly surprised to 1 see a dusty Government car draw up and the District Nurse, looking somewhat weary, run up the steps and disappear into the building'. The younger visitors, noticing the stag’s head strapped to the radiator, quickly discovered that the contents of the car were unusual. On the back seat lay a ybung woman looking very ill indeed, in the front seat was the Government ranger somewhat awkwardly nursing a very young baby, and on the floor lay a dead turkey. A rifle leaned against the seat. The story was also unusual. It began the previous day when a pale young man was trudging wearily through the scrub up one of our remote valleys. Back in the foothills, two miles beyond the river, his wife lay sick, with a young baby and his attempts to get a doctor had failed. The position was getting desperate. By noon the following day the Nurse and her guide had reached the sick woman, and after a short while, a small procession wound slowly back through the scrub towards the river. The Nurse and her patient bumped along in a dray and the guide and the patient’s relatives marched behind. The stag’s head and turkey (gifts to the guide) also shared the dray. At the river the patient was gently lifted into the cradle which glided swiftly on taut wires across the river to the waiting car, which meant hospital, and doctors for the young mother and adequate care for the baby. In these days of widespread materialism it is heartening to find the nursing service staffed with women who respond so swiftly as Nurse Thurston did, to distant calls for help, Sundays, all days, anywhere, in keeping still with their great traditions.